Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

An ancient farm system, built by hand on top of water, hidden inside one of the largest cities on earth and almost nobody knows it exists.
The chinampas of Xochimilco are human-made islands, constructed over centuries in the lakes that Mexico City was built on. At their peak they fed an entire civilisation. Today, more than 60% are abandoned, the city is slowly swallowing the edges, and once a chinampero stops farming, another one rarely takes their place. Pablo Usobiaga from Arca Tierra is trying to reverse that not by fighting the city, but by bringing it in through a dining experience.
This is part one of three episodes series recorded around Arca Tierra: Pablo Usobiaga built a restaurant — Baldío — around one idea: source everything from peasant farmers, waste nothing, and use fermentation to turn what would have been bin bags into the best things on the menu. It just became the first restaurant in Mexico City to earn a Green Michelin star. This conversation is where it starts: on the chinampas, where the food comes from. Parts two and three go deeper; into the fermentation lab with Chris (episode 423), and into the kitchen with Daniel (episode 425).
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Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
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Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
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When Janet Maro started building training programs with farmers in Tanzania, she didn't arrive with a curriculum. She asked farmers what they knew, what they needed, and what they could bring to the table — and built from there. That instinct, to treat farmers as the architects rather than the audience, turns out to explain most of what makes Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania unusual: why groups keep meeting and planning years after projects end, why an organic shop opened in Morogoro in 2012 has since seeded eight more across the country, and why a conflict between Maasai pastoralists and smallholder farmers that had turned violent was resolved not through outside intervention but through a simple exchange of manure and crop residues, negotiated by the communities themselves.
More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 
💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK
Join Gumroad
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

Mexico has thousands of bean varieties. Most people living in cities know four to five. Silke Gérman is on a mission to change that.

She is the founder of La Comandanta, a premium heirloom bean and salsa brand now in its twelfth year of connecting smallholder milpa farmers in central Mexico to retail shelves in Mexico City, the US, the UK, and Germany. Ancient Mexican bean varieties — grown for millennia in the traditional milpa polyculture system alongside corn and squash — are disappearing from fields and plates at the same time. Silke's answer is neither a seed bank nor a subsidy. It's packaging, storytelling, and making a purple runner bean from Puebla feel like something worth paying for. Along the way, La Comandanta has brought income back to communities that were emptying out, kept ancestral seeds in living soil rather than frozen storage, and built a value chain that pays farmers fairly — one bag of heirloom beans at a time.
 

More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 
💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK
Join Gumroad
Share it
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Buy us a coffee… or a meal! 
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

Gut & Bösel in Alt Madlitz, Brandenburg is one of the largest regenerative farms in Europe — 3,000 hectares of arable land and forestry on some of the sandiest, driest soils in Germany. For years, farmer Benedikt Bösel and his team have been experimenting with agroforestry, holistic grazing, and composting at scale, with no blueprint and no neighbours to learn from. That experimentation costs money, takes time, and generates knowledge that other farmers benefit from for free.
So they set up a foundation next to the farm to do the research properly — 10,000 soil samples, four university partners, climate sensors across 300 hectares, and a carbon credit programme that is already generating revenue. Max Küsters, managing director at Gut & Bösel, talks with Koen about how regenerative farms can start turning their hard-won data and ecosystem restoration work into actual income streams — through carbon markets, biodiversity credits, and eventually the insurance industry, which is slowly waking up to the fact that healthy soil is cheaper than flood damage.
This podcast is part of the AI 4 Soil Health project which aims to help farmers and policy makers by providing new tools powered by AI to monitor and predict soil health across Europe. For more information visit ai4soilhealth.eu.

More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 
💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK
Join Gumroad
Share it
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Buy us a coffee… or a meal! 
=======
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

Sylvia Kuria started with a kitchen garden and a refusal to use chemicals on food for her newborn. Seventeen years later, she runs Sylvia's Basket, aggregates organic produce across Kenya, trains smallholder farmers on half-acre plots, and helped get agroecology written into county government development plans with real budget behind it. The journey from that first bottle of pesticides to a funded policy win is not a straight line — and the business realities along the way are rarely the ones that make the headlines.
The question running through this conversation is deceptively simple: should farmers feed themselves first, before thinking about any market? Sylvia's answer, grounded in seventeen years of practice, has implications for how we think about food security, monocropping, market access, and who gets to sit at the table where decisions are made.

More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 
💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK
Join Gumroad
Share it
Give a 5-star rating
Buy us a coffee… or a meal! 
=======
🎙 YouTube channel
🔗 Linkedin
📸 Instagram
Join our newsletter!
=======
The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!